Why Big Game Publishers Make Sucky Apps (Hint: It’s You)

"But players will buy this lazy shovelware because they know the name of the game. And as long as crap keeps selling, publishers have no incentive to change their behavior... Not only are these lame games more popular than games designed specifically around iOS, they can be sold at premium prices of around $5 each. If more people will buy a $5 piece of broken shovelware than a $1 piece of original content, why bother making good games?"

More seriously though, I don't think it's quite far to say everything with those virtual controls sucks. Gameloft really did manage to perfect them really, although it does involve working the game around the controls...

Anyway, I must admit that I got tired of the app store in the end, I used to check it out constantly, but when I found I was just buying things because they were cheap or on sale, and only ever giving them 5-10 minutes, I kind of quit bothering overall...

I check out toucharcade once a week still, but as it stands I usually only end up buying SEs overpriced titles every now and then (I have FFT war of the lions on every platform released on!) and the odd discounted digital board game like Ascension. What really annoys me most about the app store is that even the good stuff overall feels almost more like test runs for something that could be actually good.

Probably the best example of this for me is Aralon, basically it's an Elder scrolls game on iOS, however, all it ends up being is a 1p MMO with lots of space, dull writing and a slightly shoddy auto targeting system. But it shows potential, the controls for it actually work rather well for the most part (although the iPad's UI leaves something to be desired unless you have super long thumbs) and it shows that if people put the effort into designing the game well it could be great.

Although there are also some really awesome things too on the store, the Cave ports really prove shooters can work on the system, some wonderful puzzlers like Triple town are wonderful to play... It just seems like the app store still has yet to provide something that makes it feel important, I've probably spent a few hundred dollars on various things on the store and still never really find myself going back to much.

Re: Capcom, the article is right on all counts (playing Mega Man 2 on iOS makes me very sad ), except for Street Fighter 4 (Vanilla and Volt). The developers didn't just try to shoehorn the console versions into an iOS thing; they actually redesigned the controls and improved (imo) the game mechanics with the new hardware in mind. Examples of such improvements are one-touch supers/ultras, SF2-style jumps, generous frame advantage on hit (so you don't have to do hard links), and a FADC that requires pressing forward once instead of twice.

Also the vanilla version has an excellent tutorial that I wish was in the console versions (and is mysteriously missing from Volt version, wtf?)